We can happily and easily disprove the idea that Judeo-Christian cosmology “damages society” by comparing the modern secular society developing after 1500AD with that of the Christian society before it.

1. You're cherrypicking features of the society. I could respond by pointing to feudalism or slavery, for instance. Having less hospitality but no slavery seems overall positive.

2. I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating what hospitality requires. If it was actually required to feed and house all beggars who come to your door, people would be overwhelmed by beggars.

3. "Judeo-Christian" here doesn't make sense. You'll have to at least include Islam. And even then, I wouldn't say that non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions made the society especially horrible. Ancient China and Japan weren't great, but in ways comparable to how "Judeo-Christian" societies weren't great.

4. "Judeo-Christian" cosmology "causes problems" by holding science back. Obviously, ancient societies had less science than we do, so this is perfectly consistent with reality.

(I have successfully done Unbendable Arm after Valentine showed me in person, without explaining any of the biomechanics. My experience of it didn't involve visualization, but felt like placing my fingertips on the wall across the room and resolving that they'd stay there. Contra jimmy's comment, IIRC I initially held my arm wrong without any cueing.)

Strongly related: Believing In. From that post:

My guess is that for lack of good concepts for distinguishing “believing in” from deception, LessWrongers, EAs, and “nerds” in general are often both too harsh on folks doing positive-sum “believing in,” and too lax on folks doing deception. (The “too lax” happens because many can tell there’s a “believing in”-shaped gap in their notions of e.g. “don’t say better things about your start-up than a reasonable outside observer would,” but they can’t tell its exact shape, so they loosen their “don’t deceive” in general.)

I feel like this post is similarly too lax on, not deception, but propositional-and-false religious beliefs.

Is the kingdom of heaven actually going to be as perfect as Christians imagine it? Is the lion really going to lie down with lamb? Is God really all-loving and omnipotent? Is that beam of light really infinite? That’s not really the point.

For believers (which I do not count myself among), leaving aside the beam of light, that very much is the point. That God really is up there/down here/in here and it is our duty to live as He has shown us. "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah 6:8.)

Another has commented that the Unbendable Arm demo is headology, and that you can just do the thing without tricking yourself into it.

I must wonder whether this "as if" conception of God will wear thin in adversity. Are you really going to put a life's work into building a cathedral for the glory of God on that foundation?

I remember that back in the 60's, the hippy era, the concept arose of the "earth mother", a woman fulfilling an ideal of bountifulness, nurturing, and attunement to Mother Nature. It did not take long for people — or at least, the women — to realise that this was a scam to get the women to do all the cooking and provide free sex (which was called free love, but that is another story). As a woman of the time put it, "there's only so many pounds of carrots you can scrub and still imagine you're having a valid spiritual experience."

Their values of humility, honor, faith, and so on are so different from our own imperatives of competition, survival of the fittest, and so on.

Yet I don't keep slaves or have serfs. Your people of humility, honor, and faith did.

Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap.

I mean... yes? They had a problem doing lots of things well. Of course that means they couldn't oppress very well either.

We are the ones who did these things, not them,

Only if you carefully define "moderns" to... not be modern. Blaming pogroms and the Spanish Inquision on "moderns" is blatantly distorting what most people mean by that in order to whitewash religion.

In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden

It feels like you're gerrymandering a time, place, and scenario to make the answer come out correctly. The medieval era was not the only era where Christianity was powerful, and you're just handwaving it away by saying that Christianity was an arm of the state after that (and ignoring the period before that--the Romans kept slaves even when they were Christian.) You're also including or not including Islam depending on whether it's convenient for your argument (they don't count when they keep slaves, but they count as religion being a source of learning). And you're handwaving away serfdom--yes, it isn't slavery, but it's still a pretty big violation of human rights practiced by religious people back then that we don't practice today.

(For that matter, I'm not convinced that "we only enslave pagans" is much of an excuse. Modern secular society doesn't enslave pagans, after all, so we're still better than them.)

How can the church hold back something which doesn’t yet exist?

By making it dangerous for it to come into existence.

it is fair to say that religious people in the industrial era have the desire to hold back science. But they simply don’t have the power anymore, they are no longer the center of learning.

There's a big gap between "no power worth speaking of" and "not in the position of the Pope in 1500". For instance, religion had enough power to be a serious obstacle to the acceptance of evolution, even if in the 21st century the remaining creationists are a joke.

While your insistence that I use colloquial rather than technical terms is cute, it’s also despicably ignorant and you’re not making strong arguments against the wider view of history I’m presenting.

It's a pretty basic principle of debate that you have to dispute things that people actually said. When "we" say that modern people are better than past people, that doesn't count the 1800s as modern, never mind the 1600s. If you don't want to call that "modern people", you can call it something else, but then your dispute is about the something else. The claim about your kind of modern is not one that people have been making; addressing it as though it is is addressing a straw man.

When I said that medieval Christians held a taboo against slavery and did not practice it, and explain the process by which secularization and early proto-sciences justified the creation of history’s most vicious form of slavery, medieval slavery in the Islamic world is not a counterexample in some kind of logical trap you’ve sprung.

You're equivocating between "religious" people and Christians specifically.

Rather, there are many mistaken and misunderstood aspects about the time and especially the role religion played

We may associate religion with the past in some vague way, an irrational set of beliefs that have been superseded by science.

Modern people are the ones who made religion a tool of harm,

If you're going to say things about "religion", Islam is relevant.

(You also brought up Jefferson claiming his religious misgivings were against slavery. Thomas Jefferson believed in God, but wasn't a Christian.)

While Liberal human rights tell you not to “keep serfs,” a stupid phrase meant to insist upon your false narrative of equivalence, remember that the most hard-headed Liberal of the early US, Thomas Jefferson, ensured that the institution of slavery would continue while owning slaves himself.

And the same goes for the things that your religion is supposedly doing--I can find prominent, influential, religious believers who thought that slavery or whatever is good. You just say that they don't count because they're "really" the state.

(Also, I'd appreciate a reference for Jefferson.)

Who cares what “most people” think, they’re fucking wrong!

You are supposedly criticizing other people:

We want to believe that as moderns we are better, more rational, so much more wise than people of the past, and it is this very conceited and highly sympathetic view of ourselves that is just so unthinkably blind.

If you are criticizing other people, you have to criticize what they are actually talking about. And pretty much none of them are saying that moderns under your definition are better than religious people. People who believe that "we are better than the past" count the 1800s as the past.

And there is no denying the modernity in the African slave trade

Of course there's denying the modernity. Because you're not defining "modern" to mean today, you're defining it to make your answer come out the way you want.

You also already gave the explanation:

Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap.

And you made the odd concession before:

The Islamic world did not in fact only enslave pagans.

Okay, so religious people, from your own specified time period, not only enslaved pagans, they also enslaved others. And somehow it still doesn't count as religious people from that time keeping slaves?

Serfs were not property of any master and ideally had protection against displacement and violence. In practice this didn’t always play out, but neither do liberal human rights.

Liberal human rights tells me to not keep serfs at all. And serfdom is evil at its core. "Serfs ideally weren't mistreated" means nothing, because they were being inherently mistreated by being serfs.

I think this is related to how interfaces are selected for by functionality, not accuracy. Accuracy is one thing that can make them functional sometimes. But not always!

I like Donald Hoffman's example of computer GUI desktops. Those aren't meant to reflect the actual state of anything at the hardware level. A given "file" on your "desktop" might be scattered across your hard drive for instance. The point of the desktop is to create a kind of semi-fictional interface that humans can use. It's not totally disconnected from what's going on in the computer; otherwise it wouldn't work. But in many ways it'd get worse as a usable interface if you made it more accurate.

Likewise, motivational inner speech ("I can do it! I can do it!") isn't meant to be an epistemically justified conclusion. It's a way of drumming up resources to try something. Refusing to use it because its literal denotations aren't justified is a kind of confusion.

Another example is the common thing about fixing posture by imagining a string attached to the top of your head that's suspended from far up in the sky. Obviously there's no such string. But somehow visualizing and "feeling" the string and kind of "hanging" from it can often help people rearrange their spine in a helpful way. It's much harder to give specific instructions about what shifts to make in the spine: that's just not the natural interface for making the right adjustments.

A maybe stranger example is learning to balance on one foot with your eyes closed. A lot of that is just your body getting used to using the vestibular and proprioceptive senses, and lots of quick micro adjustments, to stay upright. But AFAICT it's completely irrelevant whether you understand that. You just… try. And you keep trying. And eventually something hidden happens, and you get better at it (probably — some don't!). The interface there is this magic "trying" thing. More accurate detail about what you're trying is just noise (AFAIK)!

It's unclear to me where the boundaries of this effect are. If I don a frame of faith in Christ, does this create a world interface that makes some things available that are harder to access in some other way? How would I tell? If it affects how pleasant life feels to me, and by it how open-hearted I'm able to be with those I love, and those who don't hold that faith don't seem to be as free to open their hearts… well, it kind of looks like the faithless are the confused ones, aren't they? Kind of like a person who won't use a GUI interface because it's deceptive.

(I'm not claiming that specifically faith in Christ does this, by the way! I'm giving a hypothetical example. I also think some people in fact do have a subjective experience as though this hypothetical example is real — but that involves a lot of social complexities such as that they're supposed to experience it as true. So please take it as a purely theoretical example. Or feel free to debate whether it's accurate of course! But please don't frame it as though you're debating with me about its accuracy.)

I've done some Aikido and related arts, and the unbending arm demo worked on me (IIRC, it was decades ago). But learning the biomechanics also worked. More advanced, related skills, like relaxing while maintaining a strongly upright stance, also worked best by starting out with some visualizations (like a string pulling up from the top of my head, and a weight pulling down from my sacrum).

But having a physics-based model of what I was trying to do, and why it worked, was essential for me to really solidify these skills--and incorrect explanations, which I sometimes got at first, did not help me. Could just be more headology, though--other students seemed to be able to do well based off the visualizations and practice.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rZX4WuufAPbN6wQTv/no-really-i-ve-deceived-myself seems relevant.

tagged this post as self-fulfilling prophecies!

yes!! “focusing on what you want!” (i talk a little more about this and self-fulfilling prophecies here)

**aiming** at what you want. vector. (teleology, not etiology)

I am not making the simple argument that religion makes for better societies, and I can see you’re totally confused here.

If all you're saying is that at least one thing was better in at least one religious society in at least one era, then I can't disagree, but there isn't much to disagree with either.

And I think you're making an excessively fine distinction if you're not arguing that religion makes for better societies, but you are arguing that religion doesn't damage society. (Unless you think religion keeps things exactly the same?)

None of this in any way proves or even supports belief in the existence of God. It seems just as believable as an argument for agnosticism.

This comment doesn’t seem to make much sense - that is, it doesn’t seem nonsensical, but seems to be missing enough context that I don’t know how your statements are meant to fit together. 

I’m pretty sure I learned to do this based on a simple mechanistic description (without detailed physics) and practice.